Interesting piece! Heh. Look what I read today in Rothbard's Markets Not Capitalism: Instead, it said, “Get yourself a competency” – a vision fraught with republican implications suitably modernized. Working for wages, if one did it at all, was a temporary stage – to be endured while learning a skill or trade and abandoned later in favor of real or potential independence. This independence, derided in our time as “illusory,” left one free (within limits) not just from state interference but also from nineteenth-century employers. From The American Land Question, Joseph Stromberg.Abraham Lincoln famously said the reason why we have a democratic society in America is we don’t have a permanent class of wage laborers. He thought that wage labor was something you pass through in your 20s and 30s when you’re accumulating enough money to set up on your own; so the idea was everyone will eventually be self-employed.
A typical nineteenth-century American “self-help” book aimed at young
men did not say, “Get a job working for wages within an increasingly intricate division of labor so as to enjoy a greater variety of consumer goods.”
I would have thought that Noam Chomsky would be considered America's favorite anarchist.
Whether you belong to Nahmy's school or the other one...commonly know as 'left' or 'right'...it's all moot now. Everyone will soon be out of a job as AI/learning machines/bots take over production, management and distribution, the true Post Scarcity UnEconomy, where everything is done at very low or no cost. Bots have no need of money. I'm all for that even tho my or your desires are irrelevant. Hint: What will primarily speed up the arrival of the above is the deregulation of the capitalists. They will produce us to Post Scarcity, putting everyone out of work. Of course, raising the minimum wage also helps speed up the process. Marx will not be a factor. How we get from here to there is a topic for another post...but not by me. P.S. Don't tell anyone but who will pay taxes in the above scenario, ergo what will become of government?